The dramatic toppling of dictatorships in the Middle East has launched a new era and a quest for democratic vision in the Muslim world. As the international community anxiously anticipates the outcomes of uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and the Gulf states, Turkey has maneuvered itself into the spotlight.

Posters and effigies of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak scattered in Cairo's Tahrir Square included a telling symbol linked to Mubarak: the Jewish Star of David. Some factions seeking power in Egypt's new era aren't supportive of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which Mubarak more than any other Arab leader maintained for 30 years.

When a Muslim organization on a campus known for free speech tries to shut up those with a different viewpoint, what's the right penalty? At the University of California, Irvine (UCI), home to approximately 23,000 students and one of the most virulent Muslim student groups in the nation, administrators are choosing a slap on the wrist.

Iran has always claimed its nuclear ambitions are for peaceful purposes. Clandestine nuclear enrichment plants and blocked inspections of some nuclear facilities are good reasons to question those claims. Add to those an Iranian leadership with apocalyptic language and terrorist sponsorship in an already volatile region and the results could be catastrophic.

That is why the UN Security Council passed its fourth round of sanctions against Iran on June 9, with the United States three weeks later passing its toughest sanctions yet against the rogue state.

KIEV, Ukraine-After 18 months of grueling paperwork, we finally arrived on the other side of the adoption process, climbing the narrow stairwell at Ukraine's State Department of Adoptions (SDA) in Kiev on Jan. 18. We had read the blogs of couples who had gone before us, but nothing prepared us for what was ahead: Inside this office we would be shown multiple files of orphans who were available for adoption-and given no more than an hour to pick a child.

A major shift has taken place in the geopolitics of the Middle East. Turkey, a strategic ally of the West and Israel-and the only Muslim country in the region with a secular government besides fractured Iraq-has effectively signaled that it's leaving its Western friends and reorienting itself eastward.

In January, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stormed out of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland after accusing Israeli President Shimon Peres of "murdering children on beaches"-a reference to Israel's incursion into Gaza last December.

Khaled Abu Toameh has endured years of criticism for his reporting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. An Arab Muslim with Israeli citizenship, he abandoned the government-controlled Palestinian media years ago for the free press in Israel and the West and has been writing about Palestinian affairs for almost three decades. He isn't afraid to criticize Palestinian leadership when criticism is due, and that candor has earned him a few enemies.